


In Personality Changing Potions & In Health

by Tricki



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Worst Witch (TV 2017)
Genre: Episode: s02e09 Miss Softbroom, Established Relationship, F/M, Humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 08:49:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21317422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tricki/pseuds/Tricki
Summary: “I love this song!”  Hecate squeals, and Severus’ mind reels with all the possible spells that could have caused this reaction in the normally measured Hecate Hardbroom.
Relationships: Hardbroom (Worst Witch) & Severus Snape
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	In Personality Changing Potions & In Health

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends! This is set during Miss Softbroom. Our boy's still alive and teaching at Hogwarts - HP canon be damned. I hope you have fun. I certainly did. Thanks as always to Becs for coping with my headcanon-y ranting before I put this on paper.

Severus Snape is mid-way through explaining to his first year potions class the many uses of pine tree resin when his wife appears in the middle of his classroom. Severus’ first instinct, naturally, is that she is injured, in danger, Cackle’s is under attack again. He is about to bark at his class to leave the room when his normally superlative analytical powers return to him. Hecate does not look like she is fleeing for her life. Far from it.

Her hair is flowing down her back, curls bouncing freely in a way they are ordinarily never allowed during school hours. He can sense an inexplicable air of… _whimsey_ about her.

Severus has less idea how to cope with this than he would if Cackle’s were indeed in peril. 

“Hecate?” He asks, tone direct but worried. When she turns to him, he sees there is a rose between her teeth and a wicked glint in her eye. 

Whipping the rose out of her mouth she squeals “SEVERUS!” at a pitch he cannot fathom has come from her lips. It is more luck than management that keeps Severus on his feet when she launches herself at him, throwing her arms around his neck and nearly taking his eye out with the end of the rose. Her feet are dangling off the ground. Reflex alone has caused him to catch her when she leapt at him. His eyes flit from her face to his students, who are watching the couple with mouths agape. Hecate, following his gaze, releases him, slides down his body until she is planted back on the floor.

She puts on an exaggerated voice – perhaps in an attempt to seem professional. “I mean, _hellooo_, Professor Snape.” Severus’ brow pinches with confusion; this becomes a full frown when she again breaks into a grin and bops him on the nose with her rose. There is something almost lurid about it, this full, red flower in his dark, monochrome classroom. She lifts her hand and squeezes his cheeks so his lips pucker in a fishlike pout. She surges closer to him, as if she is about to kiss him, then melts away again. The motion is fluid and effortless, like a wave receding from the shore. 

Severus wants to believe she is drunk (a sight even he rarely sees), but she seems to be extraordinarily intoxicated.

She dances her way across the room, plucking a small bottle of acromantula venom from his desk and asking, “Can I drink this?” With her head cocked. She removes the stopper, sniffs it, and wrinkles her nose dubiously. She replaces the stopper and decides that, instead, she will attempt to balance the extremely valuable product on her head as she spins. Again, Severus’ reflexes are all that save the situation.

Hecate doesn’t notice the bottle flying safely onto a shelf, continues her interpretive dance tour of his potions laboratory. There is no other explanation for it; his wife is bewitched. He needs to get her somewhere else, somewhere private so he can determine what precisely has happened to her. 

She continues to dance across the room. Initially she accompanies herself by humming, but then, spying a portable music projector hanging out of one of the students’ satchels, Hecate waves her fingers and begins headbanging to the Weird Sisters’ classic ‘Do the Hippogriff’. 

“I love this song!” Hecate squeals, and Severus’ mind reels with all the possible spells that could have caused this reaction in the normally measured Hecate Hardbroom. 

His class is erupting in chatter, and he is rapidly losing control of the situation. 

“Do you think it’s a boggart?” He hears Hugo Granger-Weasley ask.

“One way to find out.” Bellaria Abbott says. Out of the corner of his eye Severus sees her raising her wand to murmurs of approval from her fellow Gryffindors. At least the Ravenclaws are largely behaving themselves.

Severus turns his head sharply and glares at his class. It is the glare that sucks the oxygen from anyone under the age of forty, and it has its desired effect now. He waves his wand and silences the music, hoping this will still his wife, but it does not. She begins to whine at him – his Hecate, _whining_. 

“No, Sevvy-woo! Come _on_, big boy, dance with me!” Severus never wants to hear such uncomfortable epithets come out of her mouth again. Every word that passes her lips is causing her husband to become more rooted in his place. She sweeps across the room and grabs his hands, as if his discomfort is increasing her determination to make him enjoy himself. She curves his hands around her hips and dips backwards into a deep bend. Without an enchantment upon her, Severus knows his wife is nowhere near this flexible, in any sense of the word. 

Severus has often been surprised by his capacity to undertake questionable activities, from the slightly amoral to the outright cruel. But Severus Snape has perhaps never been more surprised by himself than at the moment he genuinely considers performing the brachiabindo charm on the woman he loves. 

Once upright again, Hecate turns before him and begins shimmying up and down his body, pressing herself against him lasciviously and singing something about love potions absently under her breath. This is surely something more than a love potion, though. 

Sensing his moment of advantage, Severus folds his left arm over her abdomen, holding her against him. She hums with approval, turning and attempting to kiss his neck while she bats his other cheek with the rose. 

“I expect each of you to have written the seventeen most common uses of pine tree resin and three inches on which you believe represents the most important advancement in potion-making by the time I return.” He waves his wand and casts a quick monitoring spell over the potions room. It’s unsophisticated, but it should keep them in order for twenty minutes.

“No conferring, and fifteen points from Gryffindor for Miss Abbott’s insolence.”

With his wife still squirming in his arms, Severus half wrestles them back to his quarters, cursing the apparition ban that exists on the grounds of Hogwarts. 

When Severus releases her she sweeps away from him dramatically, arms moving through ballet positions above her head. 

“Why won’t you dance with me, Sevvykins?” She pouts, waving the rose at him as if it’s a wand and she can cast a spell over him. 

The part of Severus that hates disappointing her more than almost anything in the world is momentarily tempted to oblige her, to take her into his arms and let her fling him about his little drawing room. Sense prevails, though.

“I prefer dancing with you when you are yourself, Hecate.” He remarks, watching her continuing to float and flounce across the room. Severus withdraws his wand slowly, trying not to draw her attention. His first three covert attempts to determine what’s happened to his wife yield no results. She is not under the influence of a love potion gone wrong. She has not been poisoned. 

Suddenly Hecate’s face clouds, draws into a deep frown. 

“I’ve forgotten something.” She says. Severus pounces on this as a possible clue.

“What happened?”

She purses her lips theatrically, glancing about the room as if searching her memory. “We decided to have fun in class. Did I tell you, darling? The girls picked up the frog song _so_ fast.” Severus, who can normally intuit even her most idle thoughts from the set of her lips, the angle of her eyebrows, has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. 

“But there was something else, too…” She crosses to him again; the motion is absent, the usual gravitational pull between them taking her over even in this altered state. 

She is pressed against him before she’s decided what she wants to do with him. She begins nibbling on his pulse point. A little groan escapes from Severus entirely without his consent. Her hands are moving over his chest. Severus is assessing the relative benefits of the next three types of diagnostic spell while she teases him. Thankfully for Severus, in this state she is less able to distract him than she is with her full faculties. 

Suddenly, her head snaps away from his neck. Severus finds her eyes wide with revelation. “The _inspection_!” She pulls his chin down hard and kisses him wantonly. “Gotta go!” 

Severus’ head is still spinning when she transfers out of the room. 

Once Severus has returned to his class, concluded it without (verbally) threatening his students with death, he makes his way to Hogsmeade so he can apparate to Cackle’s. The whole exercise takes Severus no more than forty five minutes, but his chest is tight with anxiety by the time he arrives at the castle his wife works within. He bumps into Dimity Drill first, in the bright entrance hall. 

“Where is Ada?” He asks, not bothering with any niceties. Dimity rolls her eyes at how irritatingly like his wife Severus is. 

“She’s…” Dimity hesitates, wondering why Hecate hasn’t told her husband about the inspection. On a normal day Severus Snape seems to know more about the ins and outs of Cackle’s than half the teaching staff. “At Magic Council.” Severus’ already tense face clouds. 

“Hecate?” 

“In the potions room.” Dimity is frowning too, now. Why does he need to ask? And why does he seem so tense? Proving again his similarity to his wife, Severus apparates from the hall rather than walking the short distance to the potions laboratory. Dimity huffs. Her day has been exhausting enough without adding Severus Snape to the mix.

Hecate glances up when Severus appears in her classroom with a pop, her brow furrowed. 

“Severus. Darling. Did we have… plans?” She looks utterly confused, as if she hasn’t invaded one of his lessons and ground herself against him in a way that was just shy of obscene. 

She is unsettled by the purpose in his strides as he crosses to her, coupled with the frown. Normally strides like this result in a kiss so deep her knees want to concede defeat, but the set of his face is not a prelude to intimacy. 

“Are you alright?” He asks, closing his left hand around her cheek while drawing his wand with the right. Hecate frowns at his wand, wondering what exactly he plans to do with it.

“I have had better days.” She admits, softening slightly into his touch despite his demeanour. He points his wand at her and nonverbally casts some kind of detection charm, just as he’d been doing in his own office earlier. 

“Have you been bewitched? Were you under the imperius curse?” 

She pulls back from him, frowning deeply. “What on earth are you talking about?” Demands his wife – his wife who no longer has her long curls tumbling down her back, who is once again immaculately put together. Was the woman who appeared in his classroom earlier even his wife? He hadn’t thought to examine her for that, trusting his senses to verify her identity. He thinks about the moment he held her against him before pulling them into his office. She had felt like his wife, the curves and angles of her body had settled against him in the way they normally do. Her hair had smelled like it always does when she takes it down in the evening and it tumbles about her torso. Is this version of her the false one?

“How many properties did we inspect?”

“Three, why- ”

“What form does my patronus take?” His tone is demanding, his eyes are hard. 

“A doe – what on earth is the matter with you!” 

Hecate’s mind is reeling with much the same series of diagnostic questions her husband has been rolling around for the afternoon. What has happened to Severus to cause this reaction in him? They are almost circling each other around the lower level of the potions laboratory. Hecate is giving serious consideration to summoning a potent antidote to hexes from the shelf behind her desk, but she isn’t certain of how he will respond. She runs her fingers through the air, trying to sense disruptions in him. Deepening her confusion, she finds none. And he feels like himself. The air around him seems to beg for her presence, his skin calls to her hands. She can’t see how the man before her could be anyone other than her husband. 

“Severus, you will tell me what’s happened?” She snarls at him. 

“Where is Ada?” Severus asks, and Hecate’s frown deepens. 

“At the Magic Council. I _sent_ you…” Hecate, near her desk through happenstance alone, gestures towards her quill and roll of parchment. Both their gazes follow her hand, and Hecate is confused to see her note to him lying incomplete and unsent on her desk. 

Hecate frowns and turns around to face desk, running her fingers over the parchment in bewilderment. 

“I was sure I’d…” She murmurs, replaying the scene in her head. 

“Hecate?” Severus asks, sensing the weight of her pause and ghosting up beside her. His hand comes to rest in the middle of her back; he has not consciously determined her to be herself, but his subconscious has decided. No one else could exude Hecate Hardbroom quite so convincingly. 

His eyes race over her familiar handwriting, daintily italicised but efficient. 

_Severus, _

_Ada has been called to the Magic Council and the Academy is facing an inspection. _

_There is a chance you will be the sole breadwinner by the end of the day. _

_I shall write when I know more. _

_Yours always_

She had been about to sign off with an initial and a kiss, as she always does. Severus notes their absence too. Even Severus’ superlative mind can’t quite keep up with the tonal change in her missive – the potential demise of Cackle’s followed by one of her droll quips. 

“Has she -?” Severus asks softly.

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her.” 

“The inspection?” 

“A success.” All this time she has barely looked up at him; while he is studying her profile, she is still singularly focussed on the note before her. Why had she not finished it, not sent it? She had been so certain, and this is not usually the kind of detail that evades her. 

Suddenly it dawns on her. She had stopped writing before signing the missive because Beatrice Bunch had called her over. She had returned her quill to its inkwell and crossed to the room to taste the girl’s colour changing potion, and then… And then what? 

Hecate straightens while Severus attempts to read her face. She turns away from her desk. The action dislodges her husband’s hand from her back; he trails it down her waist before letting it fall to his side. He prefers to be in contact with her in moments of unease. 

His gaze follows her as she clips efficiently over to an empty cauldron in the second row of desks. Severus feels he has never fully appreciated the clean determination in her gait until now. It is a comforting contrast to her earlier fluttering around his potions laboratory. Hecate can almost feel the slight release of his muscles as he watches her, but she is too focussed on her task to pay it much mind. 

She stares at the cauldron Beatrice Bunch had been using earlier as if she can will it to reveal its secrets. She is wary of touching it, based on Severus’ reaction to however she behaved earlier. 

“Cate?” Because he sounds more like himself, the word manages to penetrate her whirring mind. Her head half ticks towards him instinctively, but her eyes remain on the cauldron. She holds out her right hand and a bottle flies from the highest shelf behind her desk. She plucks it from the air when it’s near enough. 

She pulls out the stopper and pours a sparing portion of her bottled mist of time over the cauldron. Before her eyes Beatrice, Clarice, and Sybil conspire to brew a personality changing potion. Hecate watches herself sip it dubiously from Beatrice’s spoon.

“Of course.” She exhales, then waves her hand through the mist to dispel the image. Suddenly her husband’s reaction makes perfect sense – questioning whether she was under the imperius curse, his general suspicion in dealing with her, his palpable distress. 

“What, Hecate?” 

“What did I do?” She asks, ignoring his question unapologetically. 

“Danced.” Is his evasive reply.

“Danced?” Hecate frowns, pulling a face at him.

“Around my potions laboratory…” He says delicately.

Hecate’s eyebrows are possibly higher than he’s ever seen them. “Your _empty_ potions laboratory?” He is loath to pop the bubble of hope to which she is so clearly clinging. Nevertheless, he admits “In front of my first year potions class.” 

Hecate’s eyes squeeze shut with distress. He watches her try to maintain even breaths and wishes there were something he could do to comfort her. 

“Anything else?” She asks, eyes still clamped closed. 

“You… used an unfortunate epithet.” 

Her eyes open now, but with confusion more than anything. She calls him ‘darling’, she calls him ‘my love’. While she would not ordinarily use a term of endearment in front of students, she is sure this can’t be worse than dancing in front of them. “That doesn’t sound – ”

“It would be better if you didn’t continue this line of inquiry, Hecate.” 

She turns fully to him, a combination of determination and resignation radiating out of every pore. “Show me.” 

“Hecate – ” he begins to protest, but her eyes flash. 

“_Show_ me.” 

Severus transfigures one of the cauldrons on her desk into a pensieve, draws the memory from his temple and gestures her towards it. After four minutes, Hecate decides she’s seen enough. She holds the sides of the pensieve for support, gaze still on the swirling liquid within it.

“Severus, will you be offended if I never refer to you in such a way again?” 

“On the contrary. I would be deeply relieved.” 

She turns to meet his gaze with a weak smile playing about her lips. The day has clearly taken even more of a toll on Hecate than it has on him. He knows that soon she will need to reengage in the matters of the school today, she must be anxious to know what will become of Ada. His mind whirs with potential methods of distracting her. 

Settling on something, his lips ticks upwards.

“However, I would make one request, following the day’s events.” She straightens, trying to read his face. 

“Go on.” 

He reaches for her, takes her by the fingers and draws her closer to him. “I would like us to dance more often.”

“Severus – ” She begins to protest, all but rolling her eyes at him. 

He cuts her off with the kind of firm affection she loves him for. “There was a time, Mistress Hardbroom, when we would quite regularly take a turn around the kitchen. Your antics today reminded me of your talent for the artform.” 

Her smile becomes wry now, and he can see some of the tension easing in her shoulders. “I suppose I could indulge you, on occasion.” He curves his palm around her face and kisses her tenderly. For a moment Hecate thinks he will only require the undertaking from her today, but he returns his fingers to hers, steps back, then forwards. He is leading her in some kind of regency dance they both learnt at school, although she cannot recall the steps where he clearly can. They execute a fiddly turn and end up facing each other through a window made by their arms. In spite of everything, Hecate allows herself to fully inhabit the moment, sink into his gaze and permit her body to fall into instinctive synchronicity with her husband’s. She has always been surprised by how naturally their bodies flow with each other, no matter the situation. 

They complete the choreography in fond silence, and Severus draws his wife into his arms, rests his head against the side of hers. She leaves her hands in his and lets her attention linger on the feeling of his ribs expanding against her body. 

Hecate’s maglet begins to glow brightly from its position on her desk, and her attention is pulled away from him. She deigns to walk to the desk, rather than transfer the object into her hand. 

“Ada is returning shortly.” She says, staring at the message intently as if for further clues. “She’s asked me to call an assembly.” 

“Would you like me to stay?” He asks, studying her with care in an attempt to gauge her feelings. 

She glances up at him, smiles gratefully. “Thank you. But no. I should be able to manage something like this on my own.” 

Severus does not move from his place. “I should think not having to is one of the advantages of having a spouse.” 

There is a particular smile she gives him in moments like this; he can read every nuance of her feelings in it, the combination of an overwhelming love and a resignation that there are still things she must do alone. She returns the maglet to its place on the desk and crosses languidly back to him, laying her hand on his chest. 

“I shall see you at home.” She murmurs, kissing him in a way intended to give him comfort. 

“I shall return here for you at nine thirty if you have not come home.” There are times Hecate rails against his protective instinct, but tonight it is welcomed. 

She pecks his lips again, lets her fingers curl around his. “Thank you.” 

Severus leaves her then, disappearing from her laboratory with a faint pop, and gives her the time and space she requires to brief the other teachers and gather the students in anticipation of Ada’s arrival. 

While no other pair of teachers could survive such an embarrassing episode, Severus and Hecate weather the storm with relative ease. Their respective students are all much too afraid of them to breathe a word of it. 


End file.
